Washington Post despre noua scoala de film romanesc

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Romanian Film's Crystalline Lens
AFI and National Gallery Will Screen Worldbeating Movies

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007; C01

Every once in a while, an art form will blaze so brilliantly in one particular place that you sense the presence of a grand conversation underneath it.
Each artist seems in dialogue with his peers, each new work takes on coherence and depth in communion with the others. In the past decade, an
interconnected group of young Romanian actors and directors have been astonishingly productive at this very high level, a burst of creativity that may someday be compared to the great age of the novel in 19th-century _London_ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) , or with the efflorescence of abstract expressionism in _New York_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) a half century ago. What is happening today in Romanian moviemaking is that good.
Romanian actors and directors have been winning awards at film festivals for years now, and their works have been creeping onto American critics' top 10 lists. This year, it was a Romanian film, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," that won the Palme d'Or, the brass ring at _Cannes_ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) . With that award comes new prominence not just for the film's director, Cristian Mungiu, but for his peers in the new Romanian cinema. The film will be screened tonight -- demand was so strong it sold out, but it has now been moved to a larger theater -- as part of the AFI Silver's European Union Film Showcase.
That is just the beginning of an extraordinary display of Romanian films in
the coming weeks. Along with Mungiu's film, perhaps the best film ever made about abortion, AFI will also show "The Way I Spent the End of the World." And from Nov. 16 through the end of the year, the _National Gallery of Art_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) is presenting "_Bucharest_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) Stories," a survey of the past 10 years of Romanian film that amounts to an essential primer for anyone interested in contemporary cinema -- and a chastening indictment of triviality in our own American film culture.
The scope of these works is wide, the ambition deep. But many of them share a common sensibility, a passionately dispassionate view of reality. The magic and the illusion of life has been stripped away. The world is never background, never a stage set, but an intrusive, frustrating, chaotic thing, filled with accidents and mishap. Cigarette lighters don't work. Things fall out of cupboards. Cellphones drop calls. Paint peels, pipes burst, windows break, and clothes don't fit.
In 2004, the director Catalin Mitulescu won the top award at Cannes (for a
short) with a 15-minute vignette called "Traffic," in which a man on a
cellphone tries to balance work and family while surrounded by a blazing, blaring, bewildering cacophony of cars. You never quite know who he's talking to, the meeting he's late for or why an angry woman accosts him. But you've never sensed the frustration and stress of a traffic jam quite so powerfully, either. "Traffic" condenses into a powerful statement a view of cinema that might be called Disenchanted Realism. The camera is naturally a liar, a seeker of beauty, a reducer of life, a glamorizer that infuses cinematic reality with an enchanted glow. "Traffic" disenchants reality, and the result is thrilling. "There is really a belief in the long take, that hyper-realism can be effective filmically," says Todd Hitchcock, a programmer at AFI.
In the same category with "Traffic" are films such as Cristi Puiu's "The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu," a brilliant, slow-paced, hyper-vigilant account of one man's tour through the Bucharest hospital system that astonished critics last year. So too "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a heroically observed story of a woman's abortion during the final years of the Ceausescu regime, when the practice was illegal and the legal consequences brutal. And "The Paper Will Be Blue," about a young man's effort to desert his militia unit and join the revolution against Ceausescu on a night of street battles.
A small scene in "The Paper Will Be Blue" is breathtaking. In the midst of
political bedlam, with guns blazing, rumors rampant, loyalties shifting and
everyone suspect, a young man takes a moment to use the bathroom. Of course people still need to use the bathroom in war zones. But then the director, Radu Muntean, takes reality one step further. In the bathroom, the soldier opens the medicine chest and checks out the contents. Why? Perhaps it's a moment of looking behind the mirror, or searching out private reality while in the midst of a very public revolution. Perhaps it's a momentary retreat into simple curiosity, but it humanizes the man and makes his death all the more powerful when it comes, stupidly, accidentally and without meaning.
Shabbiness is essential to the truth of these films -- it is a way for the
world to impinge on our senses -- but it isn't exploited. There's no
sentimentality about poverty or suffering. Nationalism, which one might expect to crop up in an emergent national cinema, is virtually absent. In film after film, these young directors (most are in their 30s or early 40s) parse the trauma of their country in the rawest terms (and not without humor) yet never lapse into self-pity.
_Romania_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) is a poor country, one of the poorest in _Europe_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) . The 1989 revolution that ended with the flight, capture and execution of brutal dictator Nicolae Ceausescu did little to improve things at first, at least economically. A country that once contributed great artists and intellectuals to the mainstream of European cultural life was becoming exceptional, a broken place, a problem child of Europe. To flourish, Romania would need to do some trenchant self-analysis. These
films are part of that.
Foremost among their concerns is the nature of the 1989 revolution. In "The Paper Will Be Blue," we learn how it went down, what it felt like to be there. In "12:08 East of Bucharest," we see the country years later, as people process the existential question: Was there, in fact, any real revolution, or change, in Romania? To that question, the film "California Dreamin' (Endless)" offers a partial answer: no. Thugs and corruption remain. Revolution is a process, not an event.
In "Traffic" and another short "Cigarettes and Coffee" (by Puiu), we see
post-revolutionary Romania, and the social critique is severe. The latter, which took the Golden Bear for best short at the _Berlin_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) Film Festival in 2004, shows a father beseeching his son for help getting a job -- a series of long and excruciating shots of two men in a cafe, almost strangers to each other. The revolution turned the country on its head, and now fathers solicit indifferent sons for help. In several of these films, the generational difference between parents who lived their lives under communism and younger people for whom it is an increasingly remote chapter, is examined unflinchingly. Without exception, these directors find the humanity in their parents.
Even in "California Dreamin'," in which a middle-aged railway officer uses
red tape to stall an American train en route to _Kosovo_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) during the 1999 war, the villain is painfully sympathetic. He is a thief and a thug, hated by the town and perhaps his daughter as well. But carefully plotted flashbacks reveal that he has harbored a shattered romance for America since he was a boy -- and the illusions and disappointment of romance operate at every level in this masterpiece (made by Cristian Nemescu, who was killed at the age of 27 in a car accident). It is also one of the best films about how America is perceived abroad ever made.
The two films that represent Romania in the AFI European festival show the huge power of Romanian film, and the danger stalking it. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" puts an abortion on screen -- not just the extortionate brutality of the back-alley abortionist and the emotional exposure of young women with nowhere to turn, but the process, the tubes, the spread legs, the waiting, the aftermath. Watching it will leave you furious not with the characters for their moral choices, but with the poverty of American artistic life. This is a film we could never make, because we refuse to look at reality. Mungiu has courage, and the results are a film expansive enough to contain the emotional and intellectual confusion that haunts the issue.
But then there's "The Way I Spent the End of the World," which also deals
with the latter days of the Ceausescu regime, through the affairs and traumas of teenagers. Made by Mitulescu, the same director who made "Traffic," the film's credits list _Martin Scorsese_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) and Wim Wenders as executive producers.
Mitulescu won an award from Sundance and _NHK_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/re...tid=informline) , the Japanese television giant, which makes it likely his film will be broadcast there.
Alas, it's a huge step backward for the director. The film is smooth and
accomplished, occasionally touching and expertly paced. The actors are
beautiful, the music appealing. There are touches of light humor and gentle pathos. And it's generic, standard art house fare tailored to a wider audience. Success breeds temptation, and it seems Mitulescu was tempted to do the one thing that American directors do better than Romanian ones: make money. One hopes it's an exception, and that reality isn't becoming enchanted once again.